Users and organizations are increasingly adopting a bring-your-own-device plan in the enterprise environment (BYOD). A BYOD plan comprises enterprise accommodation of personal mobile device operation (including smart phones and tablets) within the enterprise. These devices are either managed by company Information Technology (IT) personnel using Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions or remain unmanaged. In the IT managed scenario, managed devices a) are securely provisioned in the enterprise environment, b) receive IT-approved configurations for enterprise Wi-Fi including authentication, access, password protections and other enterprise configuration settings, c) are subject to monitoring for compliance with IT policies, and d) may be remotely wiped and locked. When mobile devices are unmanaged, the onus falls on the user to configure settings on the device and support it.
In either the managed or unmanaged scenario, mobile devices are typically deemed “second class” and/or unsecure devices and are not granted similar permissions to other computing endpoints within an organization. Mobile device users may receive access to email, contacts and calendar through Microsoft Exchange and Active Sync, but that's it. Obviously, as the number of newer, full featured mobile devices continues to grow inside organizations, there will be increasing pressure from employees to access more content and more services within the enterprise. The Averail system described herein focuses specifically on delivering a key building block to empower mobile device users with access to enterprise content while maintaining necessary security and control for organizations.
In a typical enterprise environment users, both managed and unmanaged mobile devices enjoy less access to enterprise content (e.g. files, documents) contained in on-premise ECM systems than IT approved desktop/laptops. The limitations become more obvious as users bring in iOS and Android devices to Windows-dominant IT environments using SharePoint and Active Directory. In some cases, users are explicitly blocked from accessing enterprise content. For example, IT may block mobile devices from access to enterprise content rather than granting selective access under right policies and permissions. System configurations and device or server-specific issues may further limit accessibility, hamper ease of use or reduce functionality. For example, users without single sign-on capabilities have to repeatedly enter different credentials to access separate systems (if they can even get to them). Technologies like ActiveX controls that are widely used in browser based interfaces for SharePoint are not supported on iOS and Android. Additionally, user interfaces designed for access from web browsers on PCs do not map easily to the newer, touch based UIs prevalent on mobile devices. To address these problems, many end users take matters into their own hands and manually manage and copy content between their notebook or desktop PC and their mobile devices. This creates unnecessary work for end users, and puts the burden on them to manage synchronization to ensure possession of the right files at the right time. The end result of all of these challenges is that mobile device users receive a degraded experience and level of service on their mobile devices.
While users get frustrated at their degraded level of service, IT has its own headaches. For example, users who take things under their control to bypass IT/enterprise policies create new problems in terms of governance and information security. When users bypass approved processes and systems, they compromise business governance, compliance, auditing requirements, record management policies and information confidentiality and privacy. These problems become worse as users get more experience with a multitude of consumer-centric tools and services ranging from mobile applications (“apps”) to cloud services like Box, Dropbox, iCloud. The boundary between a user's personal content and enterprise information is becoming increasingly blurry. There is a need to balance improved user experience (UX) and choice of cloud services, against enterprise requirements to enforce information security, policy compliance and confidentiality.